Opinion

Jaden's success at the Fortnite world cup is a national tragedy

By Celia Walden

August 1, 2019 — 4.13pm

"It hasn't really hit me yet - and it probably won't until I get home." Listening to Jaden Ashman talking about his world cup win at the weekend, it was hard to feel anything but happy for the 15-year-old Brit. The Essex schoolboy told reporters what he was planning to do with his prize money. "I'm probably going to save half of it," he said of the £1.8 million ($3 million) that he'll split with his Dutch team-mate Dave Jong, "and put quite a lot of it into a house and into my family."

The Fortnite World Cup has a total prize pool of $US30 million.

That's some win, you think. And it's only when you remember that this particular world cup win didn't involve the crossing of finishing lines or scoring of goals but the playing of a video game called Fortnite that your smile cracks. Because while I can't begrudge Jaden his win, I'm also convinced that video games like Fortnite will be responsible for so many lost childhoods.

If you know what Fortnite is, chances are you're either a teenager, the parent of a teenager or in close contact with one. And if you're one of the last two, it's also likely you spend most of your time either telling the teen to "get off" one of the most popular video games in the world - one that drops its estimated 250 million users on to a virtual island where they must blast everyone in their path away with an assault rifle - or fantasising about smashing that iPad into a million pieces.

Jaden's mother, Lisa Dallman, is familiar with both scenarios. "I've been quite against him gaming," she told the BBC. "I've been more pushing him to his schoolwork. I've actually thrown an Xbox out, snapped a headset ... we've had a nightmare."

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And yet that nightmare turned into a dream for the teenager, who was thrilled to have proved his mother wrong: "Like, she didn't understand how it worked," he said, "so she thought that I was spending eight hours a day in my room just wasting my time."

I'm glad Jaden - who was given his first Xbox at the age of six - got a £900,000 payout for the loss of all those hours, days and months of childhood. They were worth far more.

I also have no doubt that you can be talented at video games or indeed anything, whether it be slot machines or the business of being Madonna: both of which I happen to have no interest in or reverence for. But I can predict where the narrative goes from here.

We take a touching success story like Jaden's, and we open up our alarmist technophobe minds to the notion that e-games might actually be on a par with tennis, football, swimming and gymnastics - and should indeed be accepted as an Olympic sport, as is seriously being suggested.

We - enlightened mental health warriors that we are - will choose not to think about what the "sport" Prince Harry called "mind-draining" is doing to the heads of young "users" (not players, you'll note). People Who Know will argue against there being evidence of gaming being noxious. Because Fortnite slants much more "towards cartoon than photorealism", because "bodies of defeated enemies simply disappear", and because "correlation is not causation", there is honestly nothing to worry about, we're told.

While on Quora, one "avid gamer" sums up my prehistoric attitude pretty succinctly: "Blaming video games for violence in our society has been a popular past [sic] time of clueless parents/old people for generations."

And while I'm pleased to hear the evidence he puts forward to support this (a lack of desire to inflict mindless violence on people IRL), I'd question how beneficial it has been on his literacy skills.

What makes us so disinclined to admit that certain (fun) things are bad for us? You'd think it a subcategory of hedonism, only hedonism is about to-hell-with-it enjoyment, while this is about our need to be indulgent and morally superior at the same time.

Let's be clear: you cannot be both. And while Jaden deserves to enjoy his success, imagine how many children trying to emulate him are doomed to failure - not just at the world cup, but at this surprisingly thrilling thing called real life.